The Legacy of C.S. Lewis and Narnia (1 of 2)

The first major motion picture of C. S. Lewis’ epic series has swept the nation and has drawn attention to the significance of biblical themes in contemporary cinema. Join us as we examine some theological and cultural implications of the The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.

The Legacy of C.S. Lewis and Narnia

The Legacy of C.S. Lewis
and Narnia: Part 1 of 2

Announcer:The 21st Century
has ushered
in events and issues that cause us to ask, where is God in todays
world? In response, Dallas Theological Seminary presents DTS Dialogue - Issues of God and
Culture: The Chronicles of Narnia. The first major
motion picture of C.S. Lewis' epic series has swept the nation and has
drawn attention to the significance of biblical themes in contemporary
cinema. Join us as we examine some theological and cultural
implications of "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the
Wardrobe," Part one.

Mark Yarbrough:Welcome to
another
addition of Dallas Seminary Podcast. I am joined here at the table by
Dr. Darrell Bock who is the Research Professor at New Testament Studies
and Professor of Spiritual Development and Culture. Across from Dr.
Bock is Dr. Hall Harris. Dr. Harris is Professor of New Testament
Studies. To his left is Dr. Glenn Kreider, Professor of Theological
Studies in the Theological Studies division. My name is Mark Yarbrough.
I am the Executive Director of Communications at Dallas Theological
Seminary. The topic that we are going to be discussing today is Narnia
and C.S. Lewis and the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Just some
stats if you don't mind to start off. Obviously this movie was released
here in the United States on December the 9th. It did about $70
million, almost that, second behind Harry Potter which had been out a
few months before that. The total U.S. gross to date is $122 million.
Globally, it has taken in about $200 million. Obviously many people are
going to watch this movie and many people will be seeing it in the days
ahead. So it brings up a lot of questions about C.S. Lewis, the
theology of C. S. Lewis, and the movie itself and how authentic it is
in relationship to the book and this is one that I can say that I have
actually read the book before seeing the movie like many other people,
and so that is what we are going to talk about. Dr. Harris, I am going
to punt the first question to you if you don't mind and let's look at
the great question of who is C. S. Lewis and what is the general story
line of the series of the Chronicles of Narnia.

Dr. Hall Harris:Well it might
be more
effective to ask the question, who is C.S. Lewis in the U.K. and who is
C.S. Lewis in America, because it has been said more than once that it
is almost as if you are dealing with two individuals. As far as the
U.K., United Kingdom, Lewis was an intellectual. He was an academic. He
spent his entire professional career at the Universities of Oxford and
Cambridge, ended up as a professor of medieval and renaissance
literature. Started out as a tutor in the university system which is,
well it is difficult to describe that. In the American system there is
no real equivalent, but it is sort of like a private teaching assistant
who is hired by students to help them prepare for exams and write
essays and critique their work, and eventually Lewis gained faculty
status and spent his entire life basically in the academic field. He
was particularly interested in renaissance and medieval literature
which was his specialty. But he was extremely widely read, remembered
virtually everything he read, and was able to comment on lots and lots
of different things. Now, C.S. Lewis started out as an atheist and
became a Christian in the 1930's, largely under the influence of J.R.R.
Tolkien, famous in the U.S. for being author of The Hobbit and the Lord
of the Rings. Lewis, after his conversion to Christianity,
began to
write apologetic works, essays and other pieces, some of which were
broadcast over the BBC, and during the second world war he actually
went around and spoke at various military bases, notably RAF stations,
talking to the troops and sort of giving a basic introduction to
Christian theology. Shortly after the second world war, Lewis began to
be more involved in fiction, and the fiction is what he is perhaps
better known for in the states. He did a series of seven children's
books known as The
Chronicles of Narnia. He also did a set of three
books that are more what we would call science fiction that go under
the general title of the space trilogies, Out of the Silent Planet,
Perelandra,
and That Hideous
Strength, and those books have continued
to be popular along with some of Lewis' apologetic works like Mere
Christianity, God
in the Dock, The
World's Last Night and other essays,
there is a whole string of those that he wrote and in addition to the
Christian writings, he did a number of professional writings as well,
like literary essays, and "The Allegory of Love," and a number of
others,
"The Discarded Image," a number of more technical works within his
field
that are not very well known in the U.S. So that's who C. S. Lewis was
in a nutshell.

Dr. Darrell Bock:
Now that's who he is in the U.K. Who is he in America?

Hall:Oh yes, I forgot about
that
point. Thank you for reminding me Darrell. Lewis in the U.S. has become
sort of a hero of the faith, inducted almost into Hebrews chapter 11
you might say, by evangelical Christians in the U.S. where he is
generally widely respected for his apologetics, and particularly his
logical and rational approach defending the Christian faith in his
arguments for the genuineness of the Christian faith.

Mark:
And why do you think that is? I mean we have all done it. Everybody
sitting here at this table, we've quoted C.S. Lewis. He has shown up in
lectures and sermons. Why is that?

Dr. Glenn Kreider:Well
one of the
reasons is because he is so quotable. He has a way of taking complex
issues and boiling them down into a sound bite. I spent a little time
looking this morning at a couple of websites that have just page after
page after page after page of quotation. And he
says what we would all like to say very clearly and succinctly. In a
way, what makes him very effective in modern apologetics is that he has
a really nice way of demonstrating the logical inconsistency of other
views and painting Christianity as the reasonable, rational
alternative.

Darrell:An example of that, I
think,
is the famous thing that probably all of us have heard, that Jesus was
liar, lunatic, or Lord, which actually is a boil-down of a passage in
Mark.

And so you think, "Golly, Lewis did this wonderful, creative thing," on
the one hand, saying it, and you kind of think it was a saying ex
nihilo, "out of nowhere," and then, lo and behold, you read this
passage
in Mark and you go, [fingers snapping] "That's where he got it!"

Mark:And he follows up on
those themes
on a regular basis. My other favorite is "He's either on the level of
someone who claims to be a poached egg or he is the lord of the
universe." And they show up all over the place.

Well, let's jump right into the movie. Obviously, that's the phenomenon
that we're dealing with. What is the backdrop of The Chronicles of
Narnia?

Hall, you mention that it was originally released by Lewis as a
children's series. What is the backdrop, anybody jump in on this one,
of The Chronicles of
Narnia, and in particular the movie that we're
talking about, "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe?"

Hall:Well, just to give a
really quick
summary, the movie, and the story, "The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe," on which the movie's based, opens with four English children
who have been sent to live in the countryside outside of London to
escape the Blitz during the second World War, the German bombing of
London.

And so they're living in a large house that's run by an old professor
and his housekeeper. The youngest of the four children, a girl named
Lucy, discovers in a vacant room an old wardrobe--a wardrobe is a large
closet-like piece of furniture that you stored coats and clothing
in--and when she looks into this wardrobe, she finds that it's actually
a doorway into another world, the world of Narnia.

And it turns out as she makes her first visit to this other world that
the land of Narnia is under the spell of the White Witch who has turned
the country to eternal winter and never Christmas.

And so the country is populated by talking animals, basically, and
they're desperately hoping for the return of their king, who happens to
be a lion named Aslan.

In the course of the story, it turns out that all four of the children
end up visiting Narnia. One of them turns traitor and goes over to the
side of the White Witch, and ultimately is rescued only by Aslan
himself substituting himself for Edmund, the traitor, and allowing the
White Witch to kill him.

So Aslan steps into Edmund's place and dies in his place, and then is
resurrected and of course there is a big battle scene at the end where
the White Witch is permanently defeated and everything is put right in
the end.

That's the basic summary.

Mark:OK. Now with that basic
summary,
one of the great questions that is often asked is, "Is this to be
understood as an allegory to the Bible?" How would you approach that
particular topic?

Glenn:It seems clearly to
be the case that the film and the story are allegorical. The question
would be whether Lewis intended to write an allegory of the Christian
story. His own testimony leads us to question that.

The story originated in his own attempt to provide entertainment for
children who stayed in his house during the war. And he had these
images in his mind about this world and he begins to tell the story and
the story develops.

I think in order to understand Narnia, you have to understand that
Narnia is a real world. It's not a REAL world, but it is a "real"
world, and in order to understand the world of the story you have to
understand the diegetic world that Lewis constructs.

And because Lewis is a Christian, because he is immersed in the
Biblical symbolism and literature, because he's immersed in the
language and the images of the text, they show up in his world.

But whether it's legitimate to read...I think I would caution against
doing that, reading the story alongside of the Biblical story and
trying to do a one-for-one correspondence.

Darrell:
What is a diegetic world?

[laughter]

It's a world on a diet?

[laughter]

Glenn:
I have a handful of technical terms I like to drop in the conversation.

The diegetic world is the world created by the story, or it is the
world of the story. It's the world of the film, it's the world of a
piece of literature. And in order to understand the story, one has to
understand the world that is constructed by the author, by the
storyteller.

Darrell:
So how the characters interact, and the nature of the reality that's
being portrayed, and all that...?

Glenn:In the world in which
you and I
live, animals don't talk. When we engage in warfare, you don't have
flying hippos and those kind of things.

Darrell:
We did in my house.

[laughter]

Mark:
So in other words, if this world existed, how would the Biblical story
have enacted itself in that world? Is that safe to say?

Glenn:Lewis said that the
question
he's trying to answer is, "How would God incarnate himself in Narnia?"
And obviously Aslan is Jesus. Obviously the lion metaphor, the lion
symbolism is the point.

But in order to understand Narnia, that's Lewis' intention. How would
God incarnate himself and address the problem in this world?

Now because in the meta-narrative of the creation, fall, and
recreation--that's the big story, the organizing--

Darrell:
The meta-story--

Mark:
There he goes, the Big Story--

[laughter]

Glenn:So in that story which
is the
relationship between the creator and his creation, whether that story
takes place in the world that we know or in a fantasy world that Lewis
creates or Tolkein creates. There are similarities between those worlds
so that there is always in every good story and in every story (not
even just a good story), every story has a problem that needs to be
resolved.

There is peril and there is a need for redemption and salvation. And
that God, in Lewis' story, enters into the world of Narnia as Aslan and
he is the one who makes things right. He is the one that restores order
and restores truth and the creator's design for that world.

Mark:Before we get into some
of the
specifics, and you had mentioned obviously, the character of Aslan, we
will talk about that. What are some of the differences between the book
and the movie? That is the age-old question of how can you take any
book and have it into a movie. And to some degree, especially as we are
dealing with this topic, it was the great question that was asked with
the Passion of the Christ and how can you take a story and relay it?
What are some of your thoughts on that as you have seen the movie now.

Glenn:I'd like hear Hall
address some
of the specifics. But one of the things that must be said, I think, is
that when you move from a story you move from a piece of literature
into a film, much of the narrators ability to communicate what is
actually going on in the thought life of people is missed, it is gone.

What the filmmaker does is either communicates that through facial
expression or the other character's descriptions. But you really have
to guess what is going on in the character's minds. There is so much.
The great strength of Lewis is that in these stories he tells us a lot
of what the characters are thinking. Which you don't see in the film by
very nature of the genre.

Hall:As far as major
differences, some
of the most noticeable things would be first of all, there is a fairly
extensive introduction that starts with a German bombing attack on
London that shows the children running for an air raid shelter and
trying to escape. Then they are put on the train and sent out to the
professor's house in the county.

Lewis opens the book with one sentence: "There were four children who
were sent away to the country to escape the air raids." This is
understandable because of modern audiences. When Lewis wrote the book,
everybody knew what was going on in London in 1940.

Obviously, changes like that are necessary to give a little back-story
and fill in details. Some of the other problems that you run into when
you go to the medium of film is that you have to keep things moving
along very, very rapidly. One of the big problems that confronts
directors and scriptwriters of films is how to move characters from
place to place when they are in widely separated locales.

For example, when the children and Mr. and Mrs. Beaver are escaping
from the Beaver's house to get away from the White Witche's wolves, who
are her secret police, they go through this tunnel and come out
somewhere else. It brings them to where they need to be. That tunnel is
not in the book. It is a device that was added into the film to move
character's from A to B.

Then there is the other idea that in order to hold a modern audience's
interest you have to have an action movie. There are some scenes, which
I would almost say are "throw away", which are put in there for the
sake of increasing the danger or the action. This would be the
waterfall crossing the river scene where the ice flow breaks up and the
children go washing down the river on a chunk of ice.

Then when they are pushed to land by the Beavers, who shove the ice
block along to the show, Peter is left holding Lucy's coat and for a
few dreadful seconds Susan and Peter think that Lucy has been drowned
and washed away. And she comes walking in from the side saying, "Has
anyone seen my coat?"

None of this is in the book. This is all added in. Probably the other
single most biggest and obvious thing is the final battle scene at the
end. Which, obviously, many of the special effects were done by the
same company in New Zealand that did "Lord of the Rings," there are
lots
of similarities.

Anybody who has seen both of those films can detect in the creatures
and the way they move and in particularly, the size of the relative
armies because in Lewis' book, he only devotes a handful of sentences
to describing the last battle. And it's, obviously, because he thinks
it is a children's book.

In fact, earlier at one point, when he is describing Aslan's trip to
the Stone Table (which is where he is going to die and be killed by the
White Witch). Lewis, actually in the book has a little aside that he
makes that "I can't really describe all these horrible creatures that
are here because if I did, your parents wouldn't let you read this
book."

In the movie, I am afraid most of those creatures are there in all
their hideous special effects glory. And the battle scene is much
bigger in scope than I think Lewis would have envisioned, probably a
few hundred fighting on each side. In the battle scene in the movie is
a cast of thousands.

Darrell:Well, I think that is an
example
where you see you are moving from a literary genre to a video genre.
You are use to certain things. Actually, you mentioned "The Lord of the
Rings" but the other scene that came to mind when I hit the battle
scene
was the Star Wars movies and some of the conflict that you see there
with the special effects and that kind of thing.

It is an interesting phenomenon. Actually, I think there was actually
concern about the level of the violence in the film for the children
who go to see it. I think it is also a little bit of a difference,
perhaps, between Europe and the United States. In the sense that Europe
tends to downplay issues of war, having experienced war as it has,
where the United States tends to have movies that go in this direction
very, very easily. I think that you are seeing all kind of cultural
things in those moments where you get those differences.

But I have to say that it certainly adds a pop to the film. I don't
know if you had a shorter battle scene if you would have the same
effect in film that you would have. You can handle it more crisply in a
book because people can imagine it but now you have to visualize it on
film.